Welcome to NordicBots. We are the biggest free bot provider on QuakeNet serving more than 20.000 users in more than 3.000 channels.

Requests can be made through the Web Request. However, before you request a bot please read our Rules carefully! If you need help while using our service please join #NordicBots.

If you are new to our bots, you might want to read our multi-language documentation.

Also, if you are not a community member yet, you should create an account so you can download various scripts, place comments etc.

Note: Please respect our staff, they work for free and they do it for you.

Latest news

A little update.

Posted by Iceman_X at 2013-08-30 17:03:01

No this site is not dead.

We are still actively maintaining 211 requestable bots on QuakeNet (222 bots in total.) for your pleasure and support.

However due to active personal lives, and more focus on bug fixes, rather than new features or functions, this site has become very silent.

But fear not, we are still here.

For questions and/or help you can always join #nordicbots on QuakeNet and query our HELP database or ask an active staff member (People who are voiced '+v' are staff. People who are opped '+o' are active at the moment.)

If nobody answers, please be patient. As stated earlier, we have active personal lives, and are not always online or active. (kids/work/etc ..)
However we have many volunteers in the channel who are more than eager to help you out.

Thanks for choosing Nordicbots and we hope we can count on your support in the future!

We would like you to suggest a nick you'd want to see as one of our bots. We'll then select 5 from the suggested ones and let you vote for your favourite, which will then become the new nick for our bot!

Today we have updated our service to the latest release which we have been quietly working on. Below is a list of the changes and new features. We hope you'll like them. We'll also tell you about features that are coming soon.

Note: We are aware that today is April 1st, we promise that all of this is real and is here to stay and that this isn't part of some April Fools joke.

If you need any help with the new features or find any bugs after the upgrade, feel free to contact a staff member in #NordicBots.

Triggers

When we introduced triggers back in 2005 as simple feature to create custom commands/replies with our bots, mainly for clans looking to make commands like '!homepage' and '!members', we honestly could not have dreamed that they would become so popular.

In the years after that, triggers have slowly evolved from basic single-line replies, to multiline replies with arguments, commands, gameserver and weather information. In 2010, 5 years after the launch, we officially reached the magical limit of 100,000 triggers. This makes triggers by far the most used function in our entire service.

There's no turning around it: triggers are immensely popular and because of that we have decided to give that feature in particular a bit more love. We have rewritten most of the trigger system removing any old bugs that were there.

Below is a list of some of the changes:

Triggers no longer have to start with '?.!'
You can now start your trigger with one of the following characters: '[email protected]#$%^&*()_+=|'":;/,<>[]_'. So basically everything not a letter or number!

Triggers are no longer limited to 10 arguments
You can now use an unlimited number of arguments. This issue would show up when using a commandtrigger like settopic, where the bot would only use the first 10 words in the topic.

Advanced users: You can now 'escape' the percent sign
For example '%%20' will print '%20' instead of writing '%' followed by the 20th argument. This means you can link to URL's containing '%' without the bot messing with your URL.

Coming soon: Write your own scripts..

It wasn't all bugs that we fixed, on the contrary.. We have been working on some functionality that will basically allow you to write scripts for our bots in your favorite web programming language such as PHP/ASP/ASP.NET (or get someone to write one for you if you're not into that :D), which will be executed when a trigger is called. We think this will open huge possbilities to what you can do with our bots.

Unfortunately we are still in the process of testing this, writing examples and documentation so we can't show it to you just yet. We really hope to have it available for everyone within the next few weeks. More information will follow soon.

We might be looking for some beta testers for this by the way, so if you are interested in either testing this as a user or coder, please let us know!

Coming soon: Timed triggers

We're also working on finishing timed triggers. Timed triggers will basically make your bot repeat a certain trigger every few minutes. You could make your bot send a channel message, or execute a script (once we finish that), etc.

We also hope to finish that feature soon, but felt we should tell you that it's coming already since lots of you are not happy with using +timedquotes to work around that, which we can fully understand. We hear you and are working to get this fixed as soon as possible.

Fresh out of beta: Weather Forecasts

Some lucky channels already had access to them through the beta !weather command, or used weather triggers: Weather forecasts for virtually any location on earth.

We are happy to announce that the weather functionality is now open for all. Simply activate the +weather channel setting and write !weather followed by a location on earth:

This service is powered by AccuWeather. We'd like to thank them for supporting our free service!

Hooray! URL titles and YouTube support are here!

Some of you have requested it through the recent request for new features, some of you through IRC. And next to 'seen' (which we hope to introduce in the future) this must have been the most requested feature. So, we are happy to tell you that they are finally here: URL titles.

The url title feature, when activated with the +urltitle channel setting, will tell you the title of URL's written to your channel. For example:

In addition we have added support for YouTube. Simply activate +youtube and when you write a YouTube URL in your channel (or a link that redirects to a YouTube URL) you will get information about the video:

As anyone using our bots most likely has noticed a lot of commands depend on +infobot. Disabling one of those commands meant disabling +infobot. Until now!

We have decided to split up +infobot into various seperate channel settings, these settings are:

+google - Google web search using !google (this has been shortened by the way, so it should be less spammy..)

+image - Google image search using !image

+translate - Google translation using !translate

Note: The original +infobot now only toggles the availability of the 'chaninfo?' command.

We have chosen to enable all these settings for channels that already had +infobot set. Feel free to disable them again if you want to.

Thanks

That's it for now.

I'd personally like to thank anyone that left their comments and suggestions on the Feature suggestions wanted newspost. We hope you'll like the changes we've made and appreciate any comments and suggestions.

Because of a move to a different datacenter and internet provider our bots (and related services such as stats) will be unavailable, starting Saturday the 26th of February around 20:00 (CET/GMT+1). At that time this website will also lack major functionality. All pages related to IRC and our bots (chaninfo, stats, logs, etc.) are likely to be unavailable once the move has started.

Thanks in advance for your patience.

ETA unknown

We're not sure yet how long this will take. It involves physically (carefully - we wouldn't want to damage them) moving a lot of servers. No settings will be lost and once the maintenance has finished bots will automatically rejoin your channel.

Is your channel suspended?

As all our services are unavailable it's not possible to get your channel unsuspended. Therefore we will add 3 days to the expiration period for suspended channels. This should give you enough time to get your channel unsuspended once everything is online again, without losing any settings.

It has been quite a while since we made some ground-breaking new features for you to use in our bots and we think it is about time that something new happened.

In the past we have introduced features like triggers (one line, multi line, weather), stats customization, bad words, command character, etc. and have extended several old commands with additional features.

Those were primarily features we figured would be nice to have. This time we would like to ask you, our users, what you think is missing. That could be some function you've seen elsewhere, something else you think could be nice to have, or just some crazy idea you have in mind - within the limitations of IRC of course.

So - it is all up to you - drop a comment below (requires a user account on this website, it's free and takes less than a minute to create!) with your ideas; anything is welcome.

Some of you may have noticed: NordicBots.com has been down for a few hours, unfortunately this wasn't your regular downtime: we got attacked.

On the 23rd of december, around 4:00-5:00 (GMT+1) someone has been able to get the login information for one of our staff members by exploiting a security bug in an old (not updated since 2003) part of our website and used that information to log in on our website.

The attacker(s) then proceeded to create a newspost telling people to download a program (trojan/virus) because NordicBots.com was supposedly going to be moved to a new server. The same attacker(s) also sent out a newsletter (functionality which we have now permanently disabled) with links to that trojan/virus. Obviously we'd never make such a posting: we would never tell you to download something, and especially not for a silly reason like moving a server - why would you need to download anything for that?

We were quite relieved to see that only a handful of people had opened the link and since most virus scanners detect the virus we don't expect that someone has actually executed it. If you have however opened that link and installed the program then we advise you to scan your computer for viruses as soon as possible, these things can be very nasty!

As a security precaution, all our database passwords are now secured in a way that they will be useless to an attacker. Even though we have found no evidence of any passwords being leaked other than the password for that single NordicBots staff member we do recommend that you change your password on any sites you are using the same password for. We are terribly sorry, this is unacceptable and should not have happened. We'll do everything to make sure something like this does not happen again.

To be able to guarantee a stable and secure site a lot of the older features have been temporarily disabled. They will have to be inspected to make sure they don't contain any security related bugs. We expect most of these functions to return somewhere tomorrow.

If you have any questions/problems or notice that some pages no longer work then feel free to contact us. Also, as always, if you find a possible security bug in our website/bots/.. then we'd be more than happy to fix it and give you credit for that.

~ The NordicBots Team

Bots down

Posted by soczol at 2010-09-03 10:04:41

Hello Everyone,

It appears that we had a small network outage (~10 minutes) on our side. These outages do not happen often, but when they do happen our bots will normally reconnect just fine once the connection is up again. Unfortunately something appears to have gone wrong today: A protection system at QuakeNet's has identified some of our bots as 'Flood clones' which caused them to get G-lined (banned from QuakeNet).

We are not sure how long this G-line lasts and we are doing all we can to get our bots online again as soon as possible.

Please be patient while we resolve these issues. Thanks!

Update 11:00: We are disabling the G-lined bots and are attempting to get as many bots online as possible.

Update 11:14: Done! 145 bots are online. The following 64 bots are still offline:

Apparently TheAvatar has turned 26 today. I say 'apparently' because I can't believe that another year has passed already.

It still feels like yesterday, seeing TheAvatar taking a big step in his career by switching jobs, not sure where the new opportunity would bring him.

I guess it's safe to say that he ended up great with his new job as a network/datacenter technician (hey, at least he didn't break THAT much), and at the same time managed to make some time available for us, NordicBots, and his own company, EuShells.

TheAvatar, you're a great person and it has been great working with you for yet another year. I honestly hope we can continue doing that for a long long time. I also really hope, heck I'm pretty confident, that this new project of yours will turn out great and it has been a pleasure assisting you with that project.

Have a great birthday!

From me and the others at NordicBots!

Disclaimer: As some of you may have noticed the frequency for the 'Happy Birthday' posts for TheAvatar has been somewhat irregular. Some may even say it appears to look like a ritual to forget about TheAvatar's birthday every year or so.

Nevertheless we do wish TheAvatar a happy birthday, even if we forget about it completely. That goes for everyone by the way.

Once again, it's time to to celebrate Petyyys birthday. He turns 25 today. Usually there would be a picture of a large cake with candles and all here, but since you became a man last year, and you happen to have birthday on a friday, it seems more right to just wish you a very nice day and a good night out with your friends or family (or a bit of both).

We hope you have a great time and have enjoyed yet another year that has passed.

As you might have noticed most of the pages that show information about a channel (e.g. chaninfo, stats, logs) are visible to everyone that knows the name of your channel, including search engines like Google. While this might not be a problem for some, we can understand that others would like to keep some information private.

We had already introduced the 'hidelogs' channel setting that made sure that the logs page was not accessible, the downside to this is that the logs page is then not accessible by anyone, not even you as the channel owner. We also received signals that some of our users would want to hide information from the channel information page and stats pages.

Where [level] is a channel level, defaulting to 'Friend' if not specified.

As you can probably tell from their names and descriptions these channel settings allow you to restrict access to these pages so that only users that have the specified level on your channel can see it.

Say you'd want to make sure that only users with the Master level or higher can view the channel info page then you'd write:

/msg |NordicBots| chanset #yourchannel +restrictchaninfo master

Then when visiting the channel information page the user will be greeted by a login screen asking them to login or register on the website.

After logging in the site checks if the user has linked their QuakeNet account to their NordicBots account already. They will be asked to do that now if they haven't yet done so.

Once they have done that, or if they had already linked their account, they will be given access to the page if they have sufficient access on the channel, else they will be shown a page explaining why they don't have access.

Guess that's about it. Please go and try it out and report any issues you might have.[ 1 comment ]

Happy Birthday h3ll!

Posted by X-LP at 2010-01-08 04:08:38

Well it seems you've managed to hit 22 years old. Congratz! I have not got a chance to talk to you very much, but nonetheless, Happy Birthday man!

On behalf of the entire NordicBots team, I would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas! Hope you all have a fantastic day - eat lots of wonderful-tasting food, enjoy spending time with family and loved ones, and have fun opening all your presents ;-)
2009 has been a great year for the NordicBots bot service, and we will continue to do our best to make 2010 an even better year. Please keep in mind that we (the NordicBots) staff actually have lives besides IRC (yes, we actually do, even though it may not seem like it), and that getting help, getting requests accepted etc. may take longer than it usually does seeing as it's Christmas holidays..
Hope you've all been good this year, and that Santa brings you what you wished for! =-)

Yes, yes, the Nordicbots staff is lazy and forgot all about poor kayjay's 23rd birthday. (chances are, he's busy with his baby son, though :))

Mini-M3` turns 31 today! (See, soczol? HE isn't complaining about his age :D) he also has his kids to look after (a two year old and a five year old :D) so both the daddies celebrate their birthdays around the same time!

The NordicBots staff wish you both a happy and wonderful birthday with presents and cake <3[ 7 comments ]

Happy birthday X-LP & shitbreak!

Posted by segumisama at 2009-09-09 14:33:15

First and foremost, shitbreak's birthday was actually eight days ago. (No, the nordicbots staff didn't forget about him, they were just all extremely busy...)

And so, happy twenty first birthday to shitbreak as well as X-LP, the two newer staff members of the service.

shitbreak and X-LP are queue workers, meaning, they accept/reject channels, shitbreak is the newest staff member to the service, joining just a few months ago. X-LP's been around a bit longer than that, around two years or so, but they're both invaluable to the team, because *some* of the qws are downright lazy... (not mentioning any names...)

But you can't expect X-LP to be active today, because well, today IS his birthday. Not just his birthday, but his twenty first birthday. that means the only thing he can't do in the U.S. is rent a car (Yeah, I know, the US is crazy) and even though he doesn't drink, I'm sure he'll be out partying and having cake and ice cream and stuff!

(I'm sure shitbreak went out, got drunk, and partied so hard he threw up in a bush, and went and partied some more, too :D)

Happy (late) birthday to you both, hope you guys have (had) a great day!

Today we celebrate the birthdays of two beloved and dedicated staff members, soczol and MunkeN.

soczol, who is now 27 years ol-, ahem, young, came to the service five years ago. Even before he was a staff member, he helped with various programming, fixing bugs, etc, so it was no surprise that when he was made staff he quickly gained a master technician level. To this day, he implements new features and continues crashin-, ehm, helping* Nordicbots diligently. We wish him a happy birthday with craploads of presents and cake! :D (By the way: You're not old!)

MunkeN is the one and only Nordicbots queue worker!! (OK, not really, there's like, five more.) At only twenty years old, MunkeN is the youngest member of Nordicbots. (But he isn't the most immature, believe us.) He, for the most part, managed Nordicbots when it was on the network 'Gamesurge'. (Sadly, Nordicbots recently got removed from 'Gamesurge'.) Munken is also responsible for that horri- I mean, that AWESOME bouncer, nBounce! (I once asked him what the 'N' in nBounce stands for. His reply: "@MunkeN: the n in nbounce stands for nerds") We hope you have a wonderful birthday and get spanked twenty times! (One for each year, of course!)

Just a quick note to say that we've added Google Translate functionality to our bots allowing you to translate text to another language.

We have not yet updated the documentation on this feature, so I'll try to explain how to use it, although we don't expect it to be that hard to understand. To translate text you need to use the !translate command. This command is available if chanset +infobot is active.

The full 'syntax' for this command is: !translate [-from <lang>] [-to <lang>] <text>.

If you specify a language through the -from or -to switches then you can write the language code (e.g. nl, en, hu) or the actual name of the language (e.g. Dutch, English, Hungarian). If you do not specify a 'from' language then our bots will try to automatically detect the language the text is written in. If you do not specify a 'to' language then our bots will translate the text to English.

So to translate the dutch text "hallo wereld" to English, you only have to write:

!translate hallo wereld

And the bot will then reply with:

Translation from Dutch (autodetected) to English: hello world

Note that this is basically the same command as:

!translate -from dutch -to english hallo wereld

And the same command as:

!translate -from nl hallo wereld

That's about it. If you have any problems or think you've found a bug don't hesitate to contact us in #NordicBots

Update, April 22, 2009
Due to a bug in the 0.6.3 version yesterday, a bugfix version has been released, version 0.6.4.
It can be found in the Downloads section or updated using the script auto-updater.
Users having decode-warnings with version 0.6.3 should either go to Options=>Other=>Lock and enable (uncheck) the 'Decode'.
If not possible, you might want to close mIRC, manually update the script to 0.6.4 (replacing the two old files with the 2 new ones) and then start mIRC. The errors should disappear then and the script work.
Thanks to StareX for discovering the bug.

Our Natasha mIRC control script has been updated with a new version.
Besides adding some extra languages, it has a few minor fixes.
Please notice, as of version 0.6.3 the script requires mIRC 6.17 or higher, because the language file now uses the format UTF-8, as mIRC only supports this since version 6.17.

For mIRC < v6.17 users:
If you use an older version of mIRC than 6.17 you must stick to the 0.6.2 version, which can be found here. It does not have the same amount of languages and wont be updated further. You are adviced to disable the version checker from the Status window.[ No comments yet ]

Happy birthday dusti!

Posted by soczol at 2009-04-18 00:00:00

Looks like we've got yet another birthday this month.

This time it's dusti's time to celebrate that yet another year of working with NordicBots has passed.

Thanks for your dedication to our service, dusti. We really appreciate it and I'm confident our users do too. I hope you have a great day and that you'll continue to work with us for a long long time!

A big congratulations with your 24th birthday Petyyy!
We hope you will have a fantastic day.
Petyyy is one of the admins dedicating a large amount of his time to NordicBots doing support, managing translations and being the admin with the absolutely highest amount of handled requests.
A big thank you for your big effort making NordicBots what it is.

We are looking for volunteers that are willing to translate our English documentation to the
following languages:

Czech, French Norwegian, Slovenian and Turkish

Job Details:
Currently we have 5 translator tasks. Usually it only takes a few hours to finish one so we would
like you to finish a task within 8-10 days. Also note that we do not add new translator tasks too
often. This means that you will probably be done with all the tasks within a few weeks and it's possible
that you do not have to translate anything for months.

Previously your bot only looked at the level of the person doing the op (+o) or deop (-o). The bot now additionally checks the access of the person that is being opped/deopped.

An 'op' (+o) mode change is now allowed if any of these cases is true:

The user doing the op has the Master level or higher.

The user being opped has the Op level or higher.

A 'deop' (-o) mode change is now allowed if any of these cases is true:

The user doing the deop has the Owner level or higher.

The user being deopped has a lower level than the user doing the deop

The user being deopped is not known on the channel (not added, or not authed to Q)

In all other cases the mode change will be reverted. So any users being opped will be deopped, and any users being deopped will be opped.

We'd like to emphasize that +bitch is not some 'protection' system from takeovers. If there is any service capable of protecting your channel, it would be Q.

Only giving ops to people you trust will also limit the chances of a takeover happening in your channel.

If you have any questions, about these modifications, or just about our bots in general, feel free to join #Nordicbots and ask. We'd also appreciate it if you would report any issues you might be having with this modification.

G-line

Posted by TheAvatar at 2009-01-22 08:25:55

We are currently experiencing technical difficulties due to temporary G-line, meaning all our bots wont respond, and a part of the bots are not present on their channels.
We hope the G-line will expire at approx 17:15.

Update: As expected, the G-line expired at 17:15 and all our bots are back online. Thanks for your patience![ No comments yet ]

Channel stats beta features

Posted by TheAvatar at 2009-01-14 00:33:56

We have tried playing a bit around with PISG in the past time.
We have so far ended up with three improvements:

The stats time is increased drastically.
Stats will update atleast once an hour all day/night. At night, updates will occur more often.

You have all, daily, weekly and monthly stats to choose from.

We have added the ability to ignore nicks and merge nicks (if a user has more than one nick showing up in the stats, you can put these into just one nick).
This feature is still beta, but feel free to try it out. Here is how to:

Primary nickname: The nick you want shown in the stats
Additional nicknames: The extra nicknames a user has, you want merged under the primary nickname. This is a SPACE seperated list.
Update entry: If the primary nick is already present, it will add additional nicks to the current entry.
Use the Del X link to remove an entry from the list.

Please keep in mind this feature is BETA and might change any time. Please let me know if it doesnt work as explained above.
Depending on a few things it might take 30-90 minutes, before changes will show up on the stats.

Linking your account is 100% safe and does NOT involve your Q-password in any way! There is no way your Q-account can be compromised using this feature!

Today is a day of celebration, as one of our dear staffmembers turn older.
This time it's h3ll who's celebrating his 21st birthday!
On behalf of the whole NordicBots team, I would like to wish you a very happy birthday!
Have a jolly day. :)

It's the time when we settle down and spend some time with our families and friends.
Our bots won't do this though, so no worries about that, but don't be suprised if our staff members aren't as active as usual.

As you might know, we also have a service running at the GameSurge network. This service was set up as an experimental project, we wanted to see if our bots could run on other networks than QuakeNet.

After some modifications and tests, our service was launched in March 2007 and we were soon handling requests for Natasha bots, with success: we are currently supporting 206 channels.

Unfortunately we soon noticed that our bots were not fully compatible with the network, our bots would interfere with ChanServ/SpamServ and those services would in turn kick our bot when it tries to deop or kick someone, or when it was writing just a bit too fast.

The quality of the service on this network was also not comparable to the service you'd expect from us. Due to some nasty bugs our service would crash, and stay down for hours without anyone noticing. Requests would stay queued for hours.

We came to the conclusion that we could not continue like this. This is why we have had to take the hard decision to shut down our service on the GameSurge network.

Our service on GameSurge will be closed on 01-01-2009, at which point all bots will be disconnected.

Our request service has been shutdown, which means no new requests can be made. If you already have a bot from us in your channel, you will still be able to use it, until 01-01-2009.

We would like to thank anyone that made this project possible, all staff members that participated in the service, all users that helped us out, and of course everyone that requested one our bots.

Personally, I would like to thank one person in particular: MunkeN. This project wouldn't have been running without him. Thanks for dedicating your time into expanding our service to this network, and sorry it didn't work out to be as great as we hoped it would be.

Thanks everyone, it was great while it lasted!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us in #NordicBots (GameSurge and QuakeNet).[ 2 comments ]

Happy birthday Phoenix_the_II!

Posted by Petyyy at 2008-12-02 15:26:03

Time passes rapidly, it's December again which means Phoenix_the_II's birthday! Today he turns 24!

On behalf of the NordicBots Staff, I wish you a happy birthday. I hope you have a good time :)

If any of you would like to congratulate him, feel free to /msg Phoenix_the_II Happy birthday!

We at NordicBots would like to send our biggest congratulations to Kenneth (kayjay), his girlfriend and their little newborn baby.
He was born Monday at 12'o'clock, healthy, a weight of 3260g and 48cm long.
If you would like to send them your congratulations, Kenneth can be found online as 'kayjay'.

Our bots and other parts of our service are currently unavailable. This include stats, logs, request, botlisting, channel information etc. All services directly related to our Natasha bots.
We expect the services to be back up Sunday evening. A server relocation needs to take place first.

The bots will rejoin all their channels with all their settings kept, when they are back online.

We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

UPDATE: Bots are up again, everything should be fine. Thanks for your patience![ 1 comment ]

Birthday time again!

Posted by TheAvatar at 2008-09-09 01:51:38

And yet again... it's that time... celebration time!
X-LP is turning 20 today the 9th of September.
On behalf of the NordicBots staff, I would like to congratulate you with this big day.
We wish you all the best in the future, no longer being an official teenager :-P
Hope you will have a nice day with your family and friends.

HURRAY! HURRAY! HURRAY!

NB: Yes yes, I know due to the timezone differences it might not just yet be the right time to post this, but then just don't read it before it's time :)[ 7 comments ]

Stats faster than ever before

Posted by soczol at 2008-07-27 15:18:54

As some of you had already noticed, statistics were not being updated at regular speed. This was caused by a recent upgrade (about one week ago) to a new version of the program we use to generate these statistics: Perl IRC Stats Generator, or simply: Pisg.

Let me start with soczol. Today he turns 26! As far as I remember he joined our staff in 2005. Most of our users probably know him about those cool features he made for NordicBots but besides this he is also a great person, a good friend. After he joined NordicBots, he became a very good friend of mine and the others of course. We always can call on him in anything. I can tell you guys, working for NordicBots wouldn’t be the same without soczol. Happy birthday mate!

Okay, munken is the next, he turns 19! He is also a very active (*cough*) member of our staff. He only joined us in 2007 but he already processed more than 500 requests. Our users can find him both on QuakeNet and GameSurge. He is also a good guy, happy birthday to you too.

On behalf of the NordicBots staff we wish you both a very good birthday with a lot of presents.

A Romanian translation of our mIRC script has also been made by uSoldier. It can be found in the downloads section.[ No comments yet ]

TheAvatar is 24! Happy Birthday!

Posted by soczol at 2008-05-22 00:00:00

Indeed, another birthday post! This time it is TheAvatar's birthday.

As most of you already know, TheAvatar is one of the people that founded #NordicBots more than 7 years ago. The fact that we are still around, live and kicking, with more than 20.000 active users, shows that it surely wasn't for nothing.

Dedicated to the service since the start, TheAvatar has seen it grow. He has seen a lot of staff members join and leave, including the other founders, and I'm sure he thought of leaving himself a few times, but luckily for us he didn't. He just seems to stick forever, not that we mind tho :).

I can't speak for the others, but personally, TheAvatar is one of the people that keeps me straight and remembers me what I'm doing this for, and is there to help around when I mess up (not that that EVER happens, really..).

I'm sure that I personally couldn't have gotten this far without his help. I guess it's safe to say that NordicBots wouldn't be NordicBots without TheAvatar. And yes, that is something to be very proud of.

TheAvatar, I know you don't always have enough time as you'd want, thanks to this thing called 'real life' (including, but not limited to this thing some people call 'work' and *shrug* 'girls'), nevertheless I hope you have an awesome birthday. I'm looking forward to working with you for yet another year.

This month brings yet another birthday.!
This time we are to celebrate tiidus. Today he reaches the age of 22 years.
Tiidus is also a devoted staff member of NordicBots, but today you should take a day off having a day with your family and friends.
We hope you have wonderful day with lots of nice presents.
We look forward to work with you for another year!

In the last few years we've had to suspend a lot of channels for having other bots.

We suspect that many users simply don't know which bots are allowed and which aren't. So, we have made this post to hopefully make things a bit more clear.

First of all, there are several kinds of bottypes: Stats bots, Fun bots, News bots, Game bots, Service bots, Gather bots, QuakeNet bots (Q/S, fishbot, etc).

Our rules are very simple. We allow all of those bots except service bots (clearly, we do allow QuakeNet bots).

Note that some botservices have chosen to combine several functionalities into one bot, e.g. a fun+servicebot. These bots are not allowed either, as they are still service bots.

Our system automatically detects these service bots. This means that if you have one on your channel, sooner or later you will find the bot in your channel to be suspended.

A lot of people have wondered why it is exactly that we don't allow other service bots. Here are some of the main reasons why we don't allow service bots:

Botfights
Bringing in other service bots usually means there'll be botfights sooner or later.

For example: the other service bot tries to kick/ban our bot for voicing someone, which will in turn unban itself and rejoin, etc.

We clearly don't like botfights. Our bots are not made to protect themselves from any attacks, so fighting against other bots is useless.

One service bot is enough
We strongly believe that channels don't need more than one service bot.

Bringing in other service bots leaves a lot of duplicate/colliding functionality. We think our bots are good enough to be used on their own. If you feel otherwise, you are free to try bots from another botservice, but then you can't have our bot.

Note: Just to make things clear; these rules only go for bots from other botservices, creating your own bot is fine.

We hope this post has helped you understand which bots are allowed, and why some bots aren't. If you have any questions feel free to ask on #NordicBots.[ 1 comment ]

Bots G-lined (banned) from QuakeNet (update)

Posted by TheAvatar at 2008-01-10 09:35:59

Due to a netsplit last night, with the server the bots were on involved, about 1/3 of our bots got G-lined.
QuakeNet refused to help out, so we will have to wait for the G-line to expire. When that will be is not known, as they wont inform about G-line expiration times.
The other part of the bots will just be idling in your channel for the time being, not responding to messages or public commands. For the time being, the bots will have an away message set, which can be seen with /WHOIS .
Away: Yes : NordicBots Natasha bot is currently not available - #NordicBots

When things are back up, the message will disappear.
We expect the G-line to last anything between a few hours up to one month.

An update will be posted when we have any news to provide.

Update 16:20 (GMT+1): The G-line has expired and all bots are reconnecting to IRC. They should be in your channel within a few minutes.

All suspends have been extended by one day so you have one more day to contact us, if you want your channel to be unsuspended.

The past year has been quite a hard year for us as we lost of our long-term QuakeNet trust in January and caused a three day g-line on our bots.
Later on we were victims of those not so nice ddos attacks.
Luckily not everything that happened the past year was bad, the addition of a few new staff members and a bunch of new bot features can be considered as good things. :)

Finally I would like to thank the whole staff team for this year, it's really a pleasure doing this with you guys. :)

Probably you will notice that we are slower in these days as usually. Well it's Christmas and we have to spend some time with our family so we can't keep up our quick support but don't worry our support bots do not have social life they will work! :P

The bots are getting back online as we speak. The time is now 17:30. Sorry for the extended downtime.

Due to large changes in the power infrastructure of the datacenter that some of our servers are located in, our service will become unavailable in the evening of Friday 2007-12-14 (CET).

"Why do I have to care?"

Our bots will be unavailable and will disconnect from IRC and thus leave all channels.

(note: before asking us how to get the bot back in your channel, please read the "what do i have to do?" section below)

The server that generates statistics for your channel is also affected by this maintenance, so statistics will be unavailable too.

The only part of our service that will still be available is the website, which however will not be as functional as normal because some parts of the website are tightly linked to our other services.

"What do I have to do?"

As with previous planned downtimes, there isn't anything you can or have to do. If you already have a bot, the bot will automatically rejoin your channel once the service is up. If your channel is currently suspended, we will make sure you will still have enough time to get your channel unsuspended.

Note that we also can't do anything while the service is down, so it will be impossible to remove any suspends.

"Aha, and when exactly did you say this was going to happen?"

All servers in the datacenter will be shutdown in the time window of 00:00 - 01:30 (CET), although we may decide to shutdown some services earlier to prevent accidental data loss.

"How long is it going to take?"

After all servers have been shutdown, it will take quite a few hours for all power to be up again.

Our providers hope to start the first servers again at 03:30 while they do some more testing and hope to have all servers online again around 06:00 (CET).

At which point you will have to wait for some of the NordicBots admins to wake up and start the appropriate services ;)

Phoenix probably expected the horde of staff members - which were conveniently idle at this time - to reply with something like "Congrats!11" when he happily posted the following line in our staff channel:

Because one of the servers that NordicBots depends on is being moved to a different datacenter, our service will be unavailable for a while.

The service will be shut down around Tuesday 2007-11-27, 23:00 CET (GMT+1), at this points all bots will disconnect.

We do not know how long this is going to take, but we will keep you updated through this newspost.

"What about my channel?"
No settings will be lost, and once everything is up the bots will rejoin their channels again. There isn't anything you can do or have to do.

Note if your channel is suspended: Your channel will not be removed while the service is down, even if it's due to expire, you will be given enough time to contact us, once the service is up.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your patience and cooperation.

Update 2007-11-27 23:00:

The service has been shut down. Backups have been made and we should be ready to go.

Update 2007-11-28:

Oops.. Things didn't go as planned..

We found out that, due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, the service was shut down too early, one day too early to be precise.

The physical server move for this particular server was not scheduled in the evening of 2007-11-27, but instead one day later, in the evening of 2007-11-28.

Attempts to move the server at an earlier time have failed. We're hoping that the move that is scheduled for this evening will proceed as planned. For the time being all we can do is wait, as it's not worth the effort and time, just to get the service online for a few hours.

If everything does go as planned, our service should start getting operational again during the morning of 2007-11-29.

Thanks for your understanding and patience.

Update 2007-11-29 9:10:

Things is now back up running since approx. one hour.
Stats will not be updated until up to 24 hours from now, until then, the stats from Tuesday will be shown.
The bot Year2007 lacks its nick, but we hope to have it back soon.

A new version of our Natasha mIRC Control Script has been created. This new version replaces all the previous scripts we had for download.
With this new one, you choose a language when you load it the first time, so in the future there wont be language specific versions on our website.
This new version does as well feature an (auto)update function (can be enabled/disabled when the script is loaded or later on from the options menu), which will tell you when a new version is out. If you want to install it, just click "OK" and it will install it right away all by itself!

As this new script is rather new and contains more technical code than the old scripts, please let us know if you run into any errors using the script so we can improve it.

Update 4/11-2007
A bug was fixed so if any of you have a problem where the menus are greyd out, please redownload. Sorry.

*Privacy notice!*
Please note, if you are using the update feature it will connect to our server and report back your current version of the script, what language you are using to improve our script as well as gather a bit stats to know how much users are using the script. To more accurately measure this, the script will as well submit a random string (e.g. SUQIOMRX5262130BVQXDYOU) which is somewhat unique but not identifying you personally in any way.[ 2 comments ]

Stats and logs unavailable (FIXED)

Posted by soczol at 2007-08-20 20:54:36

As most of you who tried to use stats or logs have noticed, they are not being updated/generated at the moment.

This is because we are replacing the stats server with a different server. For those who care, it's becuase the current server is overloaded and has problems transfering big amounts of traffic.

Because the stats generation demands a lot of time and resources from the server, we have temporarily shut it down so we can make backups and transfer everything to the new server.

This means that the stats that have already been generated for channels are still available - although slightly outdated, but if you recently activated stats, you will notice that they are not being generated.

If everything goes as planned, the current server will be replaced by a new server on Friday the 24th of August.

Everything is still being logged, and once the new server is up, we will start generating stats again, nothing should be lost.

Update 24-08-2007 18:30:

All maintenance has been completed and the old statsserver has been replaced by a sparkling new one.

The new server seems to be a lot faster than the previous server: It has already finished its first stats-round in about 1 hour and 30 minutes (as a reference - the previous server took more than 5 hours).[ No comments yet ]

Scheduled downtime

Posted by soczol at 2007-08-13 23:50:56

Due to server maintenance, our bots may be unavailable for a while. Your bot will rejoin your channel as soon as possible after the maintenance is done, no channel settings should be lost.

Thanks for your patience and sorry for the inconvenience.

Update 9:10 - We are currently connecting the bots, please be patient until your bot arrives. This should take about 30 minutes.

Update 9:35 - Everything should be online. If your bot is not present please contact us in #NordicBots. Thanks for the understandings. :)[ No comments yet ]

Bots offline due to power and connection issues

Posted by soczol at 2007-08-03 16:52:39

As you might have noticed our bots are currently offline.

There have been power issues in the datacenter where the server is located, these issues seem to be resolved but we are still experiencing some connection issues - the connection is far from stable and we're having frequent disconnects (every 5 minutes or so).

Because of the huge amount of bots we have and the time it takes to connect them, we will have to wait for a stable connection before we can start them. We don't know how long this will take.

As soon as we feel the connection is stable enough, we will start connecting the bots and we will update this newspost and the #nordicbots topic.

Please be patient and bear with us while these issues are resolved.

Update 17:45 - Bots are reconnecting. However, they might not respond yet until all bots are connected.

Update 18:05 - All bots are online. We're giving them a few minutes to unlag, so expect them to be fully operational again in about 10 minutes.

Update 18:15 - All bots are fine now. We have enabled the request system, so it's possible to get one of our lovely bots again. Thanks for your patience!

Due to some mistake by QuakeNet a lot of clients (including our bots) have been G-lined (banned from QuakeNet). We don't know how long this will take, bots will be back when QuakeNet resolves this issue.

Please do NOT contact #help about this issue, they are obviously already aware of this mistake, as can be seen in the topic:

Don't ask about the glines, we're working on it. It's a mistake and _NOT_ your fault. Just stay tuned.

Please be patient while this is being solved. Thanks.

Update 01:44 - The G-line is gone and bots are slowly reconnecting. They will not be responding yet.

Update 02:00 - QuakeNet apologized for the G-line. All bots are online. All settings are of course still the same, etc.[ No comments yet ]

*Hurray* One day - Two birthdays! *Hurray*

Posted by TheAvatar at 2007-07-14 00:00:00

Today we can celebrate MunkeN's first birthday in NordicBots as he turns 18! The age where you finally become an official adult. That also means in only 3 years you will be able to buy alcohol and get drunk each weekend! But until then, we hope you will use your time more wisely in NordicBots - alcohol free :)
We hope you will have a very good birthday, get a lot of cool presents (enjoy them! The amount of presents seems to drop drastically after you become "a grown-up") and have a good time!

The other birthday - is a person who can celerate being around for one fourth of a century!
Ooh yer... he turns nothing less than 25! Despite his age he has since the day he joined NordicBots done a lot of work for our service.
Fixing a lot of bugs in the bots, making a lot of new cool features as well as maintaining a big part of our website. Still he has the time to help users, staff as well as just ordinary chatting. Nordicbots would not be what it is today without all your hours of effort!
soczol, it is a big pleasure having you here on your 25th birthday and we hope to have you around for quite a few more! :)

For those of you who wants to congratulate them: /msg soczol,MunkeN` Happy birthday!

On behalf of the NordicBots staff we wish you both a VERY good day! CONGRATS!- NordicBots Staff[ 5 comments ]

Poll: Multiplayer game support. Which game would you like the most?

Posted by soczol at 2007-06-09 18:22:03

We are continuously trying to expand our services for you - our users. As you know, it's possible to do suggestions for features in our forum, and on IRC in #NordicBots.

A few users have used the opportunity to do this and have requested a "game server information" feature. Although we think that's a nice idea, it's simply not doable to implement support for every possible game, so we need your help in picking the games we will initially be adding support for.

It would be great if you could help us out, click the button below to start voting.

The poll has been closed, thanks to everyone who has voted, it seems we have a clear winner. Congratulations to everyone that voted for Soldat!

If you feel we missed an important game, please let us know by using the comment field of this news item (this does require you to log in).

Also don't forget that if you have an idea, you can always mention it in the forums, or in our IRC channel.

Oh, and, you are only allowed to vote once, please do not cheat.[ 3 comments ]

Ooops... Seems we have forgotten a few birthdays :)

Posted by soczol at 2007-05-22 08:05:31

It has come to our attention that we kind of forgot to congratulate someone in NordicBots with a lot of his past birthdays (3 years, ouf :D). But, I want to make that right now!

He's the guy that was there from the beginning, one of the main guys that made NordicBots what it is today: TheAvatar.

He had the weird idea to start a botservice years ago and managed to support that idea for more than seven years. We have had bad times and good times in NB, but you kept supporting us, which i think isn't always as awarded as it should be, so I would like to take the time do so.

TheAvatar has reached the age of 23 today, and as we kind of forgot to mention him in previous news items, this would officially be his first 'doh, you are getting old' post :)

Thanks for all your time in NordicBots, we hope you will stay with us for a long time, and *really* sorry for forgetting all your birthdays in the past, hope you can forgive us ;)

As you know it's about 7 years ago since NordicBots started. In those 7 years a lot of things have changed, renewed and updated, with the exception of one essential part: the design for our website. One of our goals this year is to start new with a fresh look and a new and improved website. For this, we need your help! There are no real web designers in our staff, which is why we are starting the first website design contest for our website.

Overview:

This contest is open to all who are interested. To enter, please submit the website files (.html/.css/etc) or a screenshot of the design that show the front page and at least one different page for our website. The deadline for these submissions July 14th, 2007. NordicBots staff will select the top 5 candidates, which will be posted publicly for everyone to review. The community will then select the final version through a voting process.

Contest rules:

Entrants should submit the website files (.html/.css/etc) or a screenshot of the design.

The final 5 candidates will be chosen based on a number of criteria including:

Overall design -- does it look ugly.

Navigation -- can people find their way around easily.

Render time -- how long will pages take to load?

Flexibility and Scalability of design -- can we add new pages and sections easily to allow for future growth.

Cool factor -- totally subjective interpretation of the submission. Does it "wow" us.

Designs relying on flash animation or other proprietary formats will be penalized heavily. Your best bet is to stick with open formats.

By submitting your design, you are also indicating that you are willing to design and create the necessary graphics for our web sites. This is a one-time only task and don't require a great deal of time and effort. Only the initial design will take time and effort. You are also indicating that you are willing and able to supply us with the PSD files of your design and graphics, so we can do our own adjustments in the future.

The submitter of the winning design will have the opportunity to place a link at the bottom of every page that says "Design provided by " and links to a web page of your choosing. (We reserve the right to change or remove the link if it points to objectionable content, such as a porn site). The right to display this link is contingent on the submitter actually completing the design as described above.

Design requirements:

All designs should at least have a menu and a logo. You can use the existing logo, or you can create your own. Let your imagination go wild! :)

Main Page

A few areas of news type items (Filled with "Lorem Ipsum" - http://www.lipsum.com/)

Extra points if you add a nice and attractive way to quickly request a bot

Second Page (for example the request page)

Some way to change the language of the page (design, of course - no scripting by you is needed)

A few paragraphs of content (can be anything, lorem ipsum if you have no idea :))

Submissions:

Submissions should be sent to contest @ nordicbots . com and must be received by July 14th, 2007.

Questions and Answers (Q&A):

Q: Can I submit multiple designs?

Yes, but only if they are each unique. Please do not submit multiple variations of a single design, such as different colors. In that case, pick the one you like best and submit it.

Q: What do you consider "ugly"? Isn't that very subjective?

We are seeking a design that is clean and is appealing to a large group of people. We are not seeking "fringe" designs that may be considered beautiful by a small subset of people, but are unlikely to be appreciated by the bulk of our user base.

Q: What do you mean by "Cool factor"? Isn't that very subjective?

The "Cool factor" is something that is impossible to describe. It simply means that, when we look at a submission and say "wow, that's cool", then you've achieved it. It may be a unique feature of the site or a different way of designing things. It can be anything that you think will cause us to go "wow, that's cool". And yes, it's 100% subjective.

Q: Why not let the community pick from all available entries instead of just 5 that are selected by a group of developers?

We expect the community to pick a site largely based on its look. We also need to consider other factors, such as navigation, etc, so we will select the best 5 candidates that meet all of the criteria listed above before presenting it to the community.

Q: What if you don't get any good submissions?

We will stick with the current design.

Q: Can we see the designs that were rejected after the contest?

We will not own the copyright to any of the rejected designs and thus may not legally display them. If individual submitters wish to show their own designs on their own sites, they may do so at their own discretion. If the author agrees, the rejected design can be placed somehwere on the site.

Due to QuakeNet suspending the old auth, |iRcBoT|, of the bot called |iRcBoT|, we had to create a new Q-auth for it.
Please re-add it +ao in Q/L, by issuing the command:/msg Q,L chanlev #your-channel |iRcBoT| +ao

Update: It seems the bot was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. The Q-AUTH has been unsuspended and restored.

Happy birthday dear tiidus, happy birthday to you *sings*

Posted by soczol at 2007-04-18 12:58:19

Hurray, yet another birthday ;)

This time it's tiidus's turn to buy us all some cake as he has reached the age of 21 (yes kids, another oldie one!).

If you were in #NordicBots lately, you might have noticed that we were having some stability problems with our bots. This was due to a Natasha upgrade, that upgrade sadly did not go as planned, although we did do extensive testing before even considering launching the new version we found out that the newly baked code still had some flaws.

We think we have ironed most of those flaws out of Natasha and we felt it was time to tell you all about the changes this new version for Natasha brings you, so here we go! :)

Ban System
The ban system has been fully revised, the old ban system was not good at removing its own bans, had problems kicking multiple people, etc.

The new ban system has support for a load more new features which includes adding so called 'sticky' bans, a sticky ban is a ban that may never be removed from the channel. If someone removes a sticky ban, the bot will always try to set it back. It's also supported to ban users by nick, auth, host and later on also IP (this is still in development). The new ban system introduces a few new commands, and channel settings, as listed below.

Channel settings

dynamicbans

If set, the bot removes non-sticky bans [minutes] minute(s) after setting them on the channel (default: enabled, 5m).

enforcebans

If set, the bot will kick users that match bans set by other users (default: enabled)

showbanby

If set, the bot shows the auth/nick of the user that set the ban when kicking. (default: enabled).

userbans

If not set, the bot will not allow users to manually place bans on the channel, bans needs to be made through the bot. (default: enabled).

Commands

The BAN and UNBAN commands have been updated, more information about how to use them be found at the documentation.

Two new commands have been added:

UNBANALL

Will remove all the non-sticky bans from the channel (not from the banlist!) - Level: Op

DELALLBANS

Will remove all bans (including sticky bans) from the channel and banlist - Level: Master

We are sure that this will make our bots a load faster and make them lag less.

Chanset Rewrite

The CHANSET command has been rewritten from scratch, it has much more friendlier messages, and if you want to know what a certain mode does you can do: HELP CHANSET setting, for example:
/msg NB-Check help chanset massvoice

And the bot would respond with help:
Usage: CHANSET #chan +massvoice [mask], example: CHANSET #chan +massvoice MyClan|*
If you activate this, the bot will automatically give voice to people matching the mask you specify, if you don't specify a mask, the bot will voice everyone.

Trigger modifications

A lot of people can stop bugging me now as we finally introduced trigger modifications which includes support for multiple lines!

Triggers can be modified with the MODTRIGGER command. You can add lines, modify or remove them. How it works you ask? Well it's rather simple.

First, you have to add a trigger the regular way (through the ADDTRIGGER) command, for example:
ADDTRIGGER #chan !commands Commands available for this channel:

Then, if you want to add another line, you do that this way:
MODTRIGGER #chan !commands add !command1 - !command2 - !command3

That's it, you now added a line to the trigger !commands, if you type it now you will get the following response:
Commands available for this channel:
!command1 - !command2 - !command3

Due to continuous abuse from takeover kiddies, we have had to change the way how topic protection works. Channels that have topic protection enabled (chanset +topic) can only have their topic set through the bot's SETTOPIC command, any other topic will be replaced.

Note: Sadly this also means that if you never set a topic through SETTOPIC, the bot will restore an empty topic.

Mode enforcement changes

The chanset +modes will now be enforced, unlike the previous system which would only set it on join, the new system will always try to make sure the modes in +modes are set. Note that modes that are not in +modes, are not removed.
When setting +modes like: +modes -ilk+tn the bot will make sure that the modes '+i', '+l', and '+k' are never set on the channel, also it will make sure that the modes '+t' and '+n' are always set on the channel, but it doesn't care if someone sets '+N'.

Advertise/Flood changes

The advertise and flood modes now have configurable punishments (warn, warn+kick, kick, warn+ban, ban) just like the badwords setting. For more information on how this works, read the documentation about Bad word, advertise and flood protection.

Peak changes

The peak system has been completely renewed. It will no longer flood the channel if a large group of users joins, and it will remember who 'broke' the last peak and at what time (if available).

Massvoice changes

Massvoice now takes effect immediately, and after the bot joined the channel/gets ops. This will mean that all users matching the massvoice mask will get voiced.
We have also extended the mask functionality and it's now possible to add full hostmasks (like *!*@*.some.isp.com), of course the old system is still supported.

We have also added support for 'Google Define' to show the definition of a term:
!google define:IRC
(Response: 1. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. IRC is a massive network of text-based chat channels (rooms) and users all across the world. See Also: CHAT ROOM)

mIRC Script
The mIRC control script has been updated too and can be found in the Download area after logging in.

That's it!
That's about it for the new Natasha release. We hope you will like the changes and would like you thank all once again for using our services.

I would like to especially thank the users that were patient and didn't keep bugging us while the service kept crashing, thanks! Let's hope we we can leave this behind us now.[ 4 comments ]

Unstable service

Posted by soczol at 2007-03-02 13:17:26

As you might have noticed, our service has been quite unstable in the past few months. This is mainly due to crashes in our 'natasha' service.

Some of you might have heard the name before but wonder what 'natasha' actually is. Natasha is the name of the service that runs all the bots. All our bots run from one natasha program/process at our botserver.

The advantage of having everything in one program is that all bots can 'help around', as you probably have noticed you can message any of our bots to do things on your channel, and random bots will reply to your commands, also you can easily move bots around, etc. The disadvantage of this however is, that if there is just one tiny thingie that breaks, our whole service crashes, this means all bots are down. It takes quite some time before the 200+ bots are all online again.

Hours and hours have been spent trying to locate and fix the bugs that crashed natasha but apparently without any success, as at the moment of writing the service crashed again.

It was clear that we wouldn't be able to find the bugs ourselves in the huge natasha code. So we started looking for programs to help us find out what's going wrong. None however seemed to do what we wanted, we were about to give up until we found Parasoft Insure++.

Insure++ claims to be the number one tool for finding coding errors related to memory allocations. We have seen Insure++ in action and were impressed by its capabilities and we knew this was the tool we needed. However, as you might expect with such a package it costs quite some money (thousands of US dollars).

As you all know NordicBots is a completely volunteer-driven project. We really couldn't afford to put more money in a project/hobby that is already costing us too much money (servers, bandwidth, etc.) so we started mailing Parasoft, asking if they could help us out.

A few days later I received a mail from a Parasoft representative from The Netherlands and he was willing to supply us with a temporary license for FREE. Of course we are really happy with this and we would really like to thank Parasoft for helping us out.

We are confident that Insure++ can assist us in finding the bugs, hopefully resulting in a more stable service for all of you guys and girls.

I think already a lot of users have noticed our bots are working fine again.

We would like to thanks for everybody who supported us in the last few days and posted some very nice messages at QuakeNet's forum or just came to #NordicBots to keep the spirit in us. However the resistance was futile - because the QuakeNet staff didin't give back our trust - we managed to find out a way to make the bots online again. Hopefully we can keep our bots online for a long time this way.

Browse to 'Home » QuakeNet User Feedback » Critique' after you logged in, as the forums do not automatically take you there.

Note: As you can see that thread has been closed by QuakeNet staff, please do not start a new one, that won't help.

We lost the trust, but we aren't giving up this easy.

Updates

Updated news will follow when news is available.

Notice: As some people are still asking about this - we have NOT removed ANY user data. Channels, settings, users, stats, logs etc are kept unchanged! So if possible in any way - the bots will come back in the same "state" as they left - no worries about that.[ 4 comments ]

Bots G-lined (banned) from QuakeNet

Posted by TheAvatar at 2007-01-13 08:19:20

As most of you already noticed: Our bots are currently banned from QuakeNet for 72 hours.

Note: As you can see above, our trust has been removed. This information is no longer correct.

So, what does this all mean for our service?

Our service
Our IRC services (bots, request, etc.) will be down until the G-line is removed or expires after the 72 hours, this means your bot will not be in your channel while we're banned.

Channels and settings
All channels and settings (this includes triggers, quotes, bad words, etc.) are still kept and everything will just be the same again once we're back.

Suspended channels
Unlike our previous statement, all channels that are currently suspended will have another 3 days added to their expire date. This prevents channels from expiring without you being able to do anything about it, you now have enough time to contact us and get it unsuspended (once we're back of course).

Website
Our website, including stats will still be active. But some pages and functions related to the IRC service might be unavailable.

When are we back?
Our botservice was G-lined at Saturday the 13th on 01:30 CET (GMT+1).

As said before the G-line has a duration of 72 hours (equivalent to three days). This means that the G-line will be removed at Tuesday the 16th on 01:30 CET (GMT+1).

After the G-line expires all bncs need to get connected to QuakeNet again, this can take a few hours. After all the bncs connected, we can connect our bots again and we should be fully operational again.

We will keep you updated through this newsitem and through the topic in our channel #NordicBots.

For those of you reading this should spend a few seconds doing /msg fnTc^h3lll Happy birthday as it is his birthday today.
If he tries to hide under another nick you should not let him, but instead drop a /msg fnTc`off^h3lll Happy birthday :)

All of the NordicBots staff wishes h3ll a happy birthday with a lot of cool presents :)[ 3 comments ]

Holidays

Posted by Phoenix_the_II at 2006-12-22 14:55:31

With the holidays approaching we'll be spending quite a lot of our time with our families. And you probably will too.

For those who do not and who that requires our staff's assictance with either support and request queue processing:

Please bear with us that we cant be online as much as usual on these holidays. So be patient! :)

The NordicBots staff would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

If you don't mind I add some personal comments:
Another year...maybe it was better for NordicBots than 2005. We could add a lot of interesting features in this year too (thanks to our users who gave us the ideas and soczol who made them for us). We also developed our servers.
I'm very proud that I'm still the part of this great project (already 2 years) with these great people.
I hope the following year will be better for all of us. And don't worry we still have a lot of great ideas about some new features.

Since we moved the bots to a new server the stats has not been properly updating (mainly showing up for channels setting +stats the bots were moved), but the problem should have been fixed now. At the next stats update (probably some time in the morning) the problem should have been fixed and stats should update properly again.[ No comments yet ]

Happy birthday Phoenix_the_II

Posted by TheAvatar at 2006-12-02 12:49:08

Today Phoenix_the_II turns 22 years! On behalf of the entire NordicBots staff (him excluded of course), I wish you a happy birthday.
Hope you have a good time and enjoy your new Wii :P

If any of you out there would want to congratulate him, feel free to /msg Phoenix_the_II Happy birthday![ 5 comments ]

Hey everyone, because a lot of people requested this while being in our channel and on our forums we have added 'bad word' functionality!

This means that you can supply words that are not allowed on your channel (like swearing words, or other), and action will be taken to anyone (with the exception of users with the Friend level and up) using those words in your channel.

Activating bad word functionality

To be able to use the 'bad word' functionality on your channel, you have to enable the 'badwords' CHANSET through:

/msg |NordicBots| CHANSET #channel +badwords [mode] [duration]

As you can see, this setting has a few parameters, below is a list of the modes you can use:

Mode

Description

warn

Warns users saying bad words on your channel.

warn+kick

Warns users saying bad words on your channel, and kicks them the next time they do.

warn+ban

Warns users saying bad words on your channel, and bans them the next time they do. *

kick

Kicks users saying bad words on your channel without warning them.

ban

Bans users saying bad words on your channel without warning them. *

Functions marked with '*' use bans to get rid of the user. You can set the ban duration by filling the 'duration' parameter with the number of minutes you want to ban the user for, if you don't set a duration the default of 5 minutes is used.

Example if you want to warn people for saying bad words and kick them the second time they do:

/msg |NordicBots| CHANSET #channel +badwords warn+kick

Example if you want to warn people for saying bad words and ban them for 2 minutes the second time they do:

/msg |NordicBots| CHANSET #channel +badwords warn+ban 2

Adding bad words

Once you have activated the channel setting, you can start adding badwords. Badwords can be added through:

/msg |NordicBots| ADDBADWORD #channel badword

Badwords can be removed with the 'DELBADWORD' command.

That's about it! We hope you will like the new badword functionality.
If you have any problems with these functions, please contact us in #NordicBots or write a comment here.

Thanks for flying NordicBots! :)

Oh, almost forgot: We also changed the layout of the channel information (chaninfo?) pages, we hope you like the new layout![ 2 comments ]

BIRTHDAY :D

Posted by TheAvatar at 2006-11-22 09:33:33

Party Party Party

Today it is Tosk' turn to get older - somewhere close to 28!
Congratulations Tosk - we hope you will have a nice day.

That means today is also the day where you could go like /msg Tosk HAPPY BIRTHDAY :D

Due to QuakeNet suspending ^Rohan^'s old auth we have had to create a new auth for this bot. If you've got ^Rohan^ in your channel, please add the new auth to L/Q by typing:/msg L/Q chanlev #channel #NBRohan +ao

Due to QuakeNet suspending |Morrowind|'s old auth we have had to create a new auth for this bot. If you've got |Morrowind| in your channel, please add the new auth to L/Q by typing:/msg L/Q chanlev #channel #NBMorrowind +ao

Due to an error at the registrar for nordicbots.net, the domain expired this morning and was registered by a third party, apparently using it for advertising.

We're working with the registrar to get the domain back. In the meantime, certain vhosts like www.nordicbots.net, help.nordicbots.net, etc. will not work.

Update:
The domain has been restored and is fully operational again thanks to the quick response of our registrar.

Note: If you visited nordicbots.net while it was hijacked, it might take up to one day for the domain to resolve back to us again because of the way the DNS system works.[ No comments yet ]

New auth for ^AgentSmith^

Posted by kayjay at 2006-08-12 01:17:45

Due to QuakeNet suspending ^AgentSmith^'s old auth we have had to create a new auth for this bot. If you've got ^AgentSmith^ in your channel, please add the new auth to L/Q by typing:/msg L/Q chanlev #channel #NBAgentSmith +ao

The statsserver timed out around 13:20 CEST today and doesn't seem to be responding anymore. Remote powercycles do not seem to help in getting it up.

This basically means that the statsserver is down again and we don't know why.

An update will follow when more information is available.

Update @ 18:45 CEST
The statspages are online again (with outdated stats). Cause of the downtime is unknown. We should begin generating stats again in a few hours. Thanks for your patience.[ No comments yet ]

Stats are down

Posted by soczol at 2006-07-25 17:21:05

Outdated - Read newspost above

Statistics are currently offline because the statsserver was hanging all of the sudden, it has now been rebooted.

We will restart the stats services as soon as we found out what caused the hang.

Update @ 18:40:
The statspages are back online so you should be able to see stats again.
Note that stats are still not being generated.

Update @ 20:27:
The statsengine is running again and should finish it's run in a few hours after which stats should have been updated.

Update @ 2006-07-26 19:40:
We regret to tell you that we had to turn the stats-engine off again as it's causing too much load on the statsserver.

We will try to keep the statspages online, but stats will NOT be updated. The server will be reinstalled in the next few days, after which we hope the issues have been solved.

Update @ 2006-07-30 15:40:
The stats are currently inavailable but if everything goes well they should be back online later today.
The stats will probably be updated in the morning if everything goes well

Final update:
The stats should be up again as well as updating with regular intervals.
Sorry for the downtime and lack of updates.

It\'s someones birthday!

Posted by h3ll at 2006-07-14 04:14:57

Today, our lovely master technician who created a lot of stuff which you are using from our NordicBots, turned 24!
Yes, today is soczol's birthday!

From the NordicBots Staff, and other Quakenetters: Congratulations soczol![ 4 comments ]

Web and script updates

Posted by Petyyy at 2006-06-25 23:12:33

We have updated our web request system. We have also added multi language support so currently you can use English, Hungarian, Danish, Norwegean and Dutch while you are requesting a bot.

We have also updated the Natasha Control Scripts from 1.7 to 1.77. We have added the new quote system, some new chanset settings, etc. At the moment you can download it on 9 languages (English, Danish, Hungarian, Finnish, German, Norwegean, Dutch, Polish and Swedish).

If your language is not added and you want to translate it for us, feel free to contact an admin in #NordicBots.

We have also updated the history section for those of you interested in our past. It can be found here[ No comments yet ]

Nordicbots documentation

Posted by Petyyy at 2006-06-20 21:36:32

We created a new documentation page that we hope you will find very useful. It goes into detail about everything you should know when using/requesting our bots. You can find this documentation in the menu or at http://www.nordicbots.com/?id=111[ No comments yet ]

Big Update

Posted by soczol at 2006-06-12 12:46:31

It has been a while, but our Natasha bots have gotten quite a big update today, below is a list of changes. We hope you will like them.

Remember that if you have a nice idea for a feature, place a message in the appropriate forum (when logged in), place a command under this message, or visit us in #nordicbots

Triggers

Triggers have been changed quite heavily, here's a quick summary of the changes:

Types
Triggers can now be of 3 different types: Public (-public, the default), Private (-private, sends response as a private message) and Notice (-notice, sends the response as a notice)

Usage:ADDTRIGGER #chan (-public|-privmsg|-notice) ...Example:ADDTRIGGER #chan -notice !test This trigger will show up as a notice

Levels
Triggers can now be limited to certain user levels. You can for example, only make a trigger available to masters and up.

Usage:ADDTRIGGER #chan -level (friend|voice|op|master|owner) ...Example:ADDTRIGGER #chan -level master !test2 This trigger is only available for masters and owners

Argument support
We've also added basic argument support. You can, for example, use '%1' to get the first argument typed after the trigger (like in !nn all, 'all' would be the first argument), we support up to 9 arguments (%1 until %9), for those of you familiar with mIRC scripting, you can also add an '-' to the argument (like %1-) to get the argument + any arguments behind it.

Example:ADDTRIGGER #chan !nn Hey %1-, %n wishes you a good night :)

Note that you can combine the various features.

Example:ADDTRIGGER #chan -notice -level voice !test3 This will show up as a notice, but will only show if you have the voice level or higher

Image Search

As an addition to google search, we have added image search. It can be activated through CHANSET +infobot, and when used will show up to 2 results.

Usage:!image (query)Example:!image donkey

Timed Quotes

We have added a new feature called 'timed quotes'. If you activate this feature, the bot will show a random quote every few minutes.

Hiding of logs

As we have had many requests from people that did want to activate stats, but rather not activate logs, we created a new chanset called 'hidelogs'. When activated, people will not be able to view logs for your channel. If you deactivate it, the logs will be visible again.

Usage:CHANSET #chan +hidelogs

Massvoice with mask

While this isn't really a new feature, a lot of our users don't know about it, but you can use the 'massvoice' chanset to voice users matching a certain mask.

It has come to my attention that our uber-active (he handled more than 4600 requests already - 33% of our total requests) staff member Petyyy has reached the age of 21 today! :)

On behalf of the NordicBots Team: Happy birthday mate and thanks for your fabulous work in NB! :)[ 4 comments ]

Bots down

Posted by kayjay at 2006-04-07 19:03:52

We've been experiencing problems with the server hosting our bots since yesterday afternoon. Due to these problems, our bots are down, and will not respond to any commands one sends them. Also, it will not be possible to request bots until the server is back online.

We're hoping to get a solution to this problem soonish, and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

We'll be back with an update once the server is back online.

Update 8/4/06 01:00: Bots should be coming back online aswell as the other services[ 1 comment ]

Happy 20th birthday Stalker!

Posted by kayjay at 2006-03-02 14:14:39

Wohooo!
Our laziest admin, stalker, has finally turned 20! On behalf of the NordicBots staff, I'd like to wish you a happy birthday.

Due to the long time it takes us to reconnect the bots after time out/netsplits, we have tried to make some changes which includes new hostnames/IPs of all our bots.
This will not really affect any of you, except your bot should be back faster after a connection problem.

Please make sure you never trust somebody else to be your NordicBots bot to prevent takeovers. (Giving somebody op in your channel, because they claim to be your bot or such)
Unless anything else specified at our website, our bots will use a hostname ending in nordicbots.dk, .nl, .be, .eu.org, .net or .com or an IP 83.97.101.1xx, where X is a number between 62 and 90.[ No comments yet ]

Request system

Posted by Phoenix_the_II at 2006-01-25 20:23:55

Hello to all users,

We just updated the request system to a newly coded environment which it runs in.

So read the help carefully it gives because some things are not what it used to be!

We're about to rewrite big parts of our help system to suit the needs of our users. One big step in that 'big rewrite' is 'localized help' (help in your own language).

Because of that, we are looking for volunteers that are willing to translate the English help text of our new system to their own (native) language. We will then use these translations on our site and in our bots.

Note: For those of you wondering how much you're going to earn with translating, the answer is simple: nothing (but respect). Translators will get their names listed on the website. You will also get a nifty greet in our channels and you might even be asked to join our secret hideout :) Just don't expect to get any money or something like that.

Thanks! Oh and have a great 2006 everyone! :)

edit:

We have received quite a lot of applications, thanks everyone who submitted one! We closed the application form now and will start selecting users in 1-2 days. Everyone that submitted an application will be notified, wether they are accepted or not.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Posted by Petyyy at 2005-12-20 22:17:21

We would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I think this year was great for NordicBots. We added many useful features and squished quite a lot of bugs. I hope you are happy with our work. We hope that in the following years we can add more and more interesting and useful features.
~The NordicBots Staff~[ 4 comments ]

New quotesystem

Posted by soczol at 2005-12-11 19:16:02

After many requests from users, we have finally rewritten the quote system. To simplify things a bit, every quote is given it's own ID (number). Every time a quote is shown you will see that number, for example:
[soczol] !quote
[^Hobbit^] Quote #1: Some quote

In this case, #1 (or 1) is the quote ID. You will need to know this quote ID if you want to delete the quote or want to show (more information about) that specific quote.

A list of all quotes (and their ID's) is also shown on the chaninfo page for your channel.

Below you will find the new commands for the quote system:

All users:

!quote - Shows a random quote!quote find <text> - Attempts to finds a quote with 'text' in it.!quote info <id> - Shows the quote, the person that added it and if possible when it was added (only for new quotes).

Friends:

!quote add <quote> - Adds a new quote to the bot

Masters:

!quote del <id> - Deletes a quote from the bot

If you have any problems, or need help with the new quote system, please join us on #nordic-help and ask whatever you want to ask there (or just reply to this newspost).

Guess I have to test the new newssystem earlier than expected, unfortunately.
The bots just timed out a few minutes ago and we are awaiting what will happen next, if it was a short-termed timeout or if the problems we experienced last week are back again.
An update will follow when we know more.

For your information any bot-related pages like request, bot status etc will not work properly during this downtime.

UPDATE @ 3:00
The line is still not up, so we have so far started the bouncers of the bots elsewhere. That means your bot will NOT respond to any commands. In the morning, if the other server is not yet available, we will decide what to do next.

If the other server suddenly comes back online, duplicates of your bot might appear. Please be aware of that we ONLY use the following hosts for the bots:

you.can.try.but.you.cant.beat.nordicbots.com/62.216.16.83

shell4.eushells.com/83.97.98.194

UPDATE @ 13:27
As I'm writing this update our bots are reconnecting and should be responding within a few minutes.

Please note that they'll be using the "shell4.eushells.com/83.97.98.194" host, this might change, in which case you will read about that here.

If you have been here earlier, you have probably noticed that we updated our newspage a bit. Here's a list of the important changes:

Comments

It's now possible to comment on newsitems, to post a comment on a newsitem, you need to login to our community. If you have done that, you need click on the comments link that can be found under each newsitem. You will then see a list of all comments and on the bottom of that page you will be given the opportunity to place a new comment.

RSS Feed

Our latest news is now available through a RSS Feed, which you can use in your RSS Reader so you will always be up-to-date with the latest NordicBots.com news.

Older news

Because of this new newssystem, we decided to start from scratch. All older newsposts are still available through the Older news menuitem.

If you have any problems with this new newspage, please post a comment on this newsitem (or contact one of our admins in #nordic-help).